Export layout from Layout XL

This rather depends on what you are using to "manipulate it". Why not do the manipulation within Virtuoso? The best solution is to keep everything in Open Access then nothing gets lost. What kind of information are you concerned about losing in this process?

Andrew

I would like to manipulate it in Python, so the ideal solution would be to export the layout in a CSV or JSON format. Ideally I would like to keep all of the information that can be seen in Layout XL. strmout achieves almost that but something gets lost, for instance pins.

Well, both CSV and JSON would be pretty terrible ways to represent a layout database, so unsurprisingly there is nothing native to export to those (somebody would need to define a suitable schema to represent the complete data in JSON, and I'm not aware of anyone having done that - it would be a lot of work and then a translator would have to be written too). Stream format (aka GDSII) is a format dedicated to storing layout information and has a well-defined schema - the main issue is that not all OA objects are represented in the format, so some conversion is needed and typically information such as connectivity is lost. OASIS is better, but even that will lose some data compared with the source Open Access database.

Andrew

Ok thank you for the insights!

So, there is no way to obtain a representation of a layout that can be manipulated in Python?

Well, you could use a python interface to the OpenAccess database. This is not a flow that Cadence would endorse though as you have to be careful to ensure interdependencies between objects is maintained and that this doesn't break the data objects built on top of OA. I can't really advise on a good way of doing what you are trying to achieve here as this is not a supported flow...